07:00 We wake early but stay in bed while Lois reads to me from her Kindle edition of Jules Verne's "Around the World in Eighty Days". For the last 3 weeks or so, we've been watching the BBC's "adaptation" of the Jules Verne original, although it's not so much an adaptation, more of a re-write - my god!!!!
Phileas Fogg (centre) with his 2 companions,
his French servant Pasepartout and his journalist friend Abigail Fix
In the TV version, the hero, Phileas Fogg, travelling via Paris, Brindisi, Suez, Aden, Bombay and Hong Kong, has reached the Pacific islands, en route to San Francisco. Lois is following the progress of the book's hero, but she's way behind - as of where she's read up to, Fogg has only just got to Bombay, but Lois is hoping that the book will pick up speed.
Lois, reading the book, is already 8000 miles behind TV's Phileas Fogg,
who's now in the South Pacific heading for San Francisco.
Lois is still in Bombay - poor Lois !!!!!
My money's on Lois to overtake Fogg eventually. The Fogg in the book has got to Bombay without really doing very much - just catching a train in London, and then boarding a P&O passenger ship at Brindisi which has taken him and his servant to Bombay. On board ship Fogg doesn't do much except play whist with a bunch of his fellow passengers.
The BBC have helpfully released a "sneak preview" of the Wild West episode, which has whetted mine and Lois's appetite, no doubt about that!
09:00 No peace for the wicked! Our weekly zoom call with Sarah, our daughter in Perth, Australia, starts, postponed from yesterday.
The TV version of Fogg has had a much busier time of it - foiling a political assassination and taking a balloon ride in Paris, saving a train from falling into a ravine in the Italian Alps and lots of ripping adventures like that, finally getting himself stranded on an uninhabited Pacific island. What madness!
In the next TV episode, Fogg is due to get involved in a Wild West adventure, with cowboys, saloons, stagecoaches and "crazy gals", an adventure that I'm guessing will prove to be "not in the book" also.
Well, we'll see.
Phileas Fogg (right) with his companion Abigail Fix, and his
servant Passepartout, stumble into a Wild West town
on their epic round-the-world trip from London
Abigail tries to find a place for them to stay
luckily there seem to be lots of cheap rooms available
Before we get up, Lois reads more to me from the "real story". We're both wearing our bed-socks, because we've read that they're conducive to better sleep.
Unfortunately we read yesterday in Lois's copy of "The Week" magazine, that we've somehow missed out on a free pair of socks. Eon, our gas and electric company, have apparently distributed 30,000 free pairs of socks to customers - but no socks haven't turned up in our letter-box as yet. Why not? I think we should be told, and quickly! What madness!!!!!
Lily and Jessie, our 8-year-old twin granddaughters are bouncing around as usual, eager to show us their latest LEGO and artistic creations.
It's still in the 100's Fahrenheit over there, and the twins, who are off school till February, have been glad of having the family's own swimming pool to cool down in. It's hotter there than in South America, apparently. What a crazy planet we live on !!!!!
Sarah had her booster Pfizer COVID jab on Friday, which she's very pleased about, but unfortunately she's been suffering side-effects: she's been feeling a bit rough, with muscle aches and feverishness.
And she's not happy that the Western Australia premier, Mark McGowan, is going ahead with opening up the state's borders in early February. She reports that, despite the current restrictions, the omicron variant has managed to penetrate the state in any case, although the number of infections is incredibly small by European standards: only a couple of dozen or so, apparently. But that makes it a "shock horror" story in Perth, because they've got used to a zero infections, zero restrictions" situation for the past few months.
Mark McGowan, Western Australia's state premier
There's more hopeful news surrounding the family's boat. Their club down on the Swan River, Nedlands Yacht Club, recently "upgraded" the launch ramp, but with the result now that it's uncomfortably narrow for many boats owned by members - which seems totally crazy.
flashback to a few months ago: the twins by the family's
boat at the old broad launching ramp, now sadly replaced
by something unsuitable - what madness !!!!!
However now, a fellow member of the club has promised to help Francis, Sarah's husband, to get a mooring: these are limited in numbers, but this guy thinks they can get an existing mooring-owner taken off the list, because he doesn't use it. It'll make it much easier for the family if they can keep their boat in the water full-time, and won't have to keep dragging it on and off the river, which sounds good!
10:00 Time to say goodbye till next weekend - sob sob!
15:00 After a nap in bed, we give the car a bit of exercise - we realise we haven't used it since we took it our last Sunday afternoon for a bit of a "run". And it's far too cold to go "somewhere nice", or to take the bold step of getting out of the car. What total madness !!!!!
blue route out, grey route back - what madness !!!!!
One of these days we must try it the other way round, just for the novelty haha!!!
The BBC is getting rather "woke" these days, so Lois and I weren't surprised, a few weeks back, to see that they'd given Fogg a female feminist companion, Abigail, who isn't in the original book.
We were also unsurprised to see that they'd made Fogg's servant Passepartout, a black man. After all Passepartout is supposed to be French, although he isn't a black man in the book.
Lois and I prefer to see history as it was, and novels as they were originally written, "warts and all", so we don't particularly like this approach. And we thought, anyway, that the idea of casting black actors in unsuitable roles, like Henry VIII's wife Anne Boleyn, was to make us not notice skin colour, any more than we notice whether somebody has blue eyes or brown eyes?
But this doesn't really work in this episode, because Passepartout's skin colour, which hasn't been referred to in any of the previous episodes, suddenly becomes an issue, when the stagecoach that the 3 travellers are riding over the Rockies in, gets involved with some ex-Confederate Ku Klux Klan guys.
It's a totally crazy and insane plot that they've cooked up for this episode. Riding in the same stagecoach as Phileas and his two companions is a black US marshal - how many of those were there? - together with his prisoner, the ex-Confederate Colonel Abernathy, who's in handcuffs.
During the journey, Abernathy objects to Passepartout and Abigail "acting too intimate".
Fogg's servant, Passepartout, gives Abigail a hand getting out of
the coach for a water stop
Abernathy objects to Phileas Fogg about Abigail's "intimate" relationship
with Passepartout, which Fogg hasn't noticed
So "wokeness" meets "uncancelled" racist history. Does that work? Lois and I don't think so!
Plus, doesn't it sort of imply that there was no racism in the culture Fogg comes from, which I somehow doubt. Call me a cynic if you like haha!
Think again, BBC haha!!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzz!!!!!
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